My goal for the culminating course activity was to identify elements from the wide range of born digital resources we'd previewed together that could be used to immediately improve aspects of my instructional procedures, focusing on my first-year general education literature course. While I was immediately tempted to apply my new learning to an upper level Creative Writing course (where I will certainly also plug in highlights from this course - both from the literature and some of the best theoretical readings), after reflection I determined that our course has convinced me that as born digital literature represents a crucial and exciting aspect of contemporary artistic expression, a strong first-year survey course should reflect that reality. Our collaboration over the past month has also convinced me that this composition and reading space will prove engaging to students in ways that expand on what is possible through more traditional parallels, and fostering a lifelong appreciation for artistic expression is certainly among my most paramount goals for the course (while it admittedly remains resistant to numerical measure.)
As I mentioned in our consultation during my planning, I recognize that my proposal here may seem pedestrian compared to the distinctly more ambitious efforts put forward by some colleagues - this is not a course or even a unit focusing on digital literature, but instead a single project. That decision was not made without some consideration. I have completed other culminating projects with pedagogical proposals that required weeks or more, and integrated a huge range of texts I'd recently read and found provocative. The downside of these ambitions was that I have never actually employed such plans, because they would have required such a drastic departure from my existing materials and a prolonged focus that, to be frank, my courses with broader requirements can't easily accommodate. My goal here was to develop a strategy that I would absolutely, without fail, put into place, and then use that as a springboard to continue expanding the representation of born digital literature across the courses I serve.
My goal for the culminating course activity was to identify elements from the wide range of born digital resources we'd previewed together that could be used to immediately improve aspects of my instructional procedures, focusing on my first-year general education literature course. While I was immediately tempted to apply my new learning to an upper level Creative Writing course (where I will certainly also plug in highlights from this course - both from the literature and some of the best theoretical readings), after reflection I determined that our course has convinced me that as born digital literature represents a crucial and exciting aspect of contemporary artistic expression, a strong first-year survey course should reflect that reality. Our collaboration over the past month has also convinced me that this composition and reading space will prove engaging to students in ways that expand on what is possible through more traditional parallels, and fostering a lifelong appreciation for artistic expression is certainly among my most paramount goals for the course (while it admittedly remains resistant to numerical measure.)
As I mentioned in our consultation during my planning, I recognize that my proposal here may seem pedestrian compared to the distinctly more ambitious efforts put forward by some colleagues - this is not a course or even a unit focusing on digital literature, but instead a single project. That decision was not made without some consideration. I have completed other culminating projects with pedagogical proposals that required weeks or more, and integrated a huge range of texts I'd recently read and found provocative. The downside of these ambitions was that I have never actually employed such plans, because they would have required such a drastic departure from my existing materials and a prolonged focus that, to be frank, my courses with broader requirements can't easily accommodate. My goal here was to develop a strategy that I would absolutely, without fail, put into place, and then use that as a springboard to continue expanding the representation of born digital literature across the courses I serve.